In a conversation in which her hesitant Hindi encountered his halting Urdu, Tilo figured out that the “Muzz-kak” that Gulrez kept referring to was Musa. He brought out a clipping of an Urdu newspaper which had published photographs of all those who had been shot on the same day as Miss Jebeen and her mother. He kissed the cutting several times over, pointing to a little girl and a young woman. Gradually Tilo pieced together the semblance of a narrative: the woman was Musa’s wife and the child was their daughter. The photos were so badly printed it was impossible to decipher their features and tell what they looked like. To make sure Tilo understood his meaning, Gulrez laid his head down on a pillow made of his palms, closed his eyes like a child and then pointed to the sky.
They’ve gone to heaven.
Tilo didn’t know that Musa was married.
He hadn’t told her.
Should he have?
Why should he have?
And why should she mind?
It was she who had walked away from him.
But she did mind.
Not because he was married, but because he hadn’t told her.
For the rest of the day a Malayalam nonsense rhyme looped endlessly in her head. It had been the monsoon anthem of an army of tiny, knickered children—she, one among them—who stomped in mud puddles and streaked down the creepered, overgreened riverbank in the pouring rain, shrieking it.
Dum! Dum! Pattalam
Saarinde veetil kalyanam
Aana pindam choru
Atta varthadu upperi
Kozhi theetam chamandi
Bang! Bang! Here’s the army band
A wedding in the house of the lord of the land
Elephant dung rice!
Fried millipedes, nice!
Minced hen-shit for spice!
She couldn’t understand. Could there be a more inappropriate response to what she had just learned? She hadn’t thought of this verse since she was five years old. Why now?
Perhaps it was raining inside her head. Perhaps it was the survival strategy of a mind that might shut down if it was foolish enough to attempt to make sense of the intricate fretwork that connected Musa’s nightmares to hers.
There was no tour guide on hand to tell her that in Kashmir nightmares were promiscuous. That they were unfaithful to their owners, they cartwheeled wantonly into other people’s dreams, they acknowledged no precincts, they were the greatest ambush artists of all. No fortification, no fence-building could keep them in check. In Kashmir the only thing to do with nightmares was to embrace them like old friends and manage them like old enemies. She would learn that of course. Soon.
She sat on the upholstered, built-in bench in the entrance porch of the houseboat and watched her second sunset. A gloomy nightfish (no relative of the nightmare) rose from the bottom of the lake and swallowed the reflection of the mountains in the water. Whole. Gulrez was laying the table for dinner (for two, clearly he knew something) when Musa arrived suddenly, quietly, entering from the back of the boat.
“Salaam.”
“Salaam.”
“You came.”
“Of course.”
“How are you? How was the journey?”
“OK. You?”
“OK.”
The rhyme in Tilo’s head swelled into a symphony.
“I’m sorry I’m so late.”
He didn’t give any further explanation. Other than looking a little gaunt, he hadn’t changed very much, and yet he was almost unrecognizable. He had grown a stubble that was almost a beard. His eyes seemed to have lightened and darkened at once, as though they’d been washed, and one color had faded and the other had not. His browngreen irises were circumscribed with a ring of black that Tilo did not remember. She saw that his outline—the shape he made in the world—had grown indistinct, smudged, somehow. He merged into his surroundings even more than he used to. It had nothing to do with the ubiquitous brown Kashmiri pheran that flapped around him. When he took off his wool cap Tilo saw that his hair had thick streaks of silver. He noticed that she noticed and ran self-conscious fingers through his hair. Strong, horse-drawing fingers, with a callus on the trigger finger. He was the same age as her. Thirty-one.
The silence between them swelled and subsided like the bellows of an accordion playing a tune that only they could hear. He knew that she knew that he knew that she knew. That’s how it was between them.
—
Gulrez brought in a tray of tea. With him too, there was no great exchange of greetings, although it was clear that there was familiarity, even love. Musa called him Gul-kak and sometimes “Mout” and had brought him eardrops. The eardrops broke the ice as only eardrops can.
“He has an ear infection, and he’s scared. Terrified,” Musa explained.
“Is he in pain? He seemed fine all day.”
“Not of the pain, there’s no pain. Of being shot. He says he can’t hear properly and he’s worried that he might not hear them at the checkposts when they say ‘Stop!’ Sometimes they first let you go through and then stop you. So if you don’t hear that…”
Gulrez, sensing the strain (and the love) in the room and alert to the fact that he could play a part in easing it, knelt on the floor theatrically, and rested his cheek on Musa’s lap with a big cauliflower ear turned upwards to receive eardrops. After ministering to both cauliflowers and stopping them up with wads of cotton wool, Musa gave him the bottle.
“Keep it carefully. When I’m not here ask her, she’ll do it,” he said. “She’s my friend.”
Gulrez, much as he coveted the tiny bottle with its plastic nozzle, much as he felt its rightful place was in his See! Buy! Fly! Visitors’ Book, entrusted it to Tilo and beamed at her. For a moment they became a spontaneously constituted family. Father bear, mother bear, baby bear.
Baby bear was by far the happiest. For dinner he produced five meat dishes: gushtaba, rista, martzwangan korma, shami kebab, chicken yakhni.
“So much food…” Tilo said.
“Cow, goat, chicken, lamb…only slaves eat like this,” Musa said, heaping an impolite amount on to his plate. “Our stomachs are graveyards.”
Tilo would not believe that baby bear had cooked the feast single-handedly.
“He was talking to brinjals and playing with the kittens all day. I didn’t see him doing any cooking.”
“He must have done it before you came. He’s a wonderful cook. His father is a professional, a waza, from Godzilla’s village.”
“Why is he here all alone?”
“He’s not alone. There are eyes and ears and hearts around him. But he can’t live in the village…it’s too dangerous for him. Gul-kak is what we call a ‘mout’—he lives in his own world, with his own rules. A bit like you, in some ways.” Musa looked up at Tilo, serious, unsmiling.
“You mean a fool, a village fool?” Tilo looked back at him, not smiling either.
“I mean a special person. A blessed person.”
“Blessed by whom? Twisted fucking way to bless someone.”
“Blessed with a beautiful soul. Here we revere our maet.”
It had been a while since Musa had heard a laconic profanity of this nature, especially from a woman. It landed lightly, like a cricket on his constricted heart, and stirred the memory of why, and how and how much, he had loved Tilo. He tried to return that thought to the locked section of the archive it had come out of.
“We nearly lost him two years ago. There was a cordon-and-search operation in his village. The men were asked to come out and line up in the fields. Gul ran out to greet the soldiers, insisting they were the Pakistani army, come to liberate them. He was singing, shouting Jeevey! Jeevey! Pakistan! He wanted to kiss their hands. They shot him in his thigh, beat him with rifle butts and left him bleeding in the snow. After that incident he became hysterical, and would try to run away whenever he saw a soldier, which is of course the most dangerous thing to do. So I brought him to Srinagar to live with us. But now since there’s hardly anybody in ou
r home—I don’t live there any more—he didn’t want to stay there either. I got him this job. This boat belongs to a friend; he’s safe here, he doesn’t need to go out. He just has to cook for the few visitors that come, hardly any do. Provisions are delivered to him. The only danger is that the boat is so old it might sink.”
“Seriously?”
Musa smiled.
“No. It’s quite safe.”
The house with “hardly anybody” in it took its place at the dinner table, a third guest, with the ravenous appetite of a slave.
“Almost all the maet in Kashmir have been killed. They were the first to be killed, because they don’t know how to obey orders. Maybe that’s why we need them. To teach us how to be free.”
“Or how to be killed?”
“Here it’s the same thing. Only the dead are free.”
Musa looked at Tilo’s hand resting on the table. He knew it better than he knew his own. She still wore the silver ring he had given her, years ago, when he was someone else. There was still ink on her middle finger.
—
Gulrez, keenly aware that he was being spoken about, hovered around the table, refilling glasses and plates, with a mewling kitten in each pocket of his pheran. During a break in the conversation, he introduced them as Agha and Khanum. The streaky gray one was Agha. The black-and-white harlequin was Khanum.
“And Sultan?” Musa asked him with a smile. “How is he?”
As if on cue, Gulrez’s face clouded over. His reply was a long profanity in a mixture of Kashmiri and Urdu. Tilo understood only the last sentence: Arre uss bewakoof ko agar yahan mintree ke saath rehna nahi aata tha, to phir woh saala is duniya mein aaya hi kyuun tha?
If that fool didn’t know how to live here with the military, why did he have to come into this world in the first place?
It was no doubt something Gulrez had heard a worried parent or neighbor say about him, and had filed away to use as a complaint against Sultan, whoever Sultan was.
Musa laughed out loud, grabbed Gulrez and kissed him on his head. Gul smiled. A happy imp.
“Who’s Sultan?” Tilo asked Musa.
“I’ll tell you later.”
—
After dinner they went out on to the porch to smoke and listen to the news on the transistor.
Three militants had been killed. Despite the curfew in Baramulla there had been major protests.
It was a no-moon night, pitch-dark, the water black as an oil slick.
The hotels on the boulevard that ran along the lakeshore had been turned into barracks, wrapped in razor wire, sandbagged and boarded up. The dining rooms were soldiers’ dormitories, the receptions daytime lock-ups, the guest rooms interrogation centers. Thick, painstakingly embroidered crewelwork drapes and exquisite carpets muffled the screams of young men having their genitals prodded with electrodes and petrol poured into their anuses.
“D’you know who’s here these days?” Musa said. “Garson Hobart. Have you been in touch with him at all?”
“Not for some years.”
“He’s Deputy Station Head, IB. It’s a pretty important post.”
“Good for him.”
There was no breeze. The lake was calm, the boat steady, the silence unsteady.
“Did you love her?”
“I did. I wanted to tell you that.”
“Why?”
Musa finished his cigarette and lit another.
“I don’t know. Something to do with honor. Yours, mine and hers.”
“Why didn’t you tell me earlier, then?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was it an arranged marriage?”
“No.”
Sitting next to Tilo, breathing next to her, he felt like an empty house whose locked windows and doors were creaking open a little, to air the ghosts trapped inside it. When he spoke again he spoke into the night, addressing the mountains, entirely invisible now, except for the winking lights of army camps that were strung across the range, like meager decorations for some dreadful festival.
“I met her in the most horrible way…horrible yet beautiful…it could have only happened here. It was the spring of ’91, our year of chaos. We—everybody except Godzilla, I think—thought Azadi was around the corner, just a heartbeat away. Every day there were gun battles, explosions, encounter killings. Militants walked openly in the streets, flaunting their weapons…”
Musa trailed off, unsettled by the sound of his own voice. He wasn’t used to it. Tilo did nothing to help him out. A part of her shied away from the story that Musa had begun to tell her, and was grateful for the diversion into generalities.
“Anyway. That year—the year I met her—I had just got a job. It should have been a big deal, but it wasn’t, because in those days everything had shut down. Nothing worked…not courts, not colleges, not schools…there was a complete breakdown of normal life…how can I tell you how it was…how crazy…it was a free-for-all…there was looting, kidnapping, murder…mass cheating in school exams. That was the funniest thing. Suddenly, in the middle of war, everyone wanted to be a Matric Pass because it would help them to get cheap loans from the government…I actually know a family in which three generations, the grandfather, father and son, all sat for the school final exam together. Imagine that. Farmers, laborers, fruit-sellers, all of them Class Two and Three pass, barely literate, sat for the exam, copied from the guidebook and passed with flying colors. They even copied that ‘Please Turn Over’ sign at the bottom of the page—the pointing finger—remember? It used to be at the bottom of our school textbooks? Even today, when we want to insult someone who’s being stupid, we say, ‘Are you a namtuk pass?’ ”
Tilo understood he was deliberately digressing, circling around a story that was as hard—harder—for him to tell as it was for her to hear.
“Are you the batch of ’91?” Musa’s soft laugh was full of affection for the foibles of his people.
She had always loved that about him, the way he belonged so completely to a people whom he loved and laughed at, complained about and swore at, but never separated himself from. Maybe she loved it because she herself didn’t—couldn’t—think of anybody as “her people.” Except perhaps the two dogs that arrived at 6 a.m. sharp in the little park outside her house where she fed them, and the hobos she drank tea with at the tea stall near the Nizamuddin dargah. But not even them, not really.
Long ago she had thought of Musa as “her people.” They had been a strange country together for a while, an island republic that had seceded from the rest of the world. Since the day they decided to go their own ways, she had had no “people.”
“We were fighting and dying in our thousands for Azadi, and at the same time we were trying to secure cheap loans from the very government we were fighting. We’re a valley of idiots and schizophrenics, and we are fighting for the freedom to be idiotic and—”
Musa stopped mid-chuckle, cocking his head. A patrol boat chugged past some distance away, the soldiers in it sweeping the surface of the water with beams of light from powerful torches. Once they had gone, he stood up. “Let’s go in, Babajaana. It’s getting cold.”
It slipped out so naturally, that old term of endearment. Babajaana. My love. She noticed. He didn’t. It wasn’t cold. But still, they went in.
Gulrez was asleep on the carpet in the dining room. Agha and Khanum were wide awake, playing on him as though his body were an amusement park constructed entirely for their pleasure. Agha hid in the crook of his knee, Khanum staged an ambush from the strategic heights of his hip.
—
Musa stood at the door of the carved, embroidered, patterned, filigreed bedroom and said, “May I come in?” and that hurt her.
“Slaves don’t necessarily have to be stupid, do they?” She sat on the edge of the bed and flipped backwards, her palms under her head, her feet remaining on the floor. Musa sat next to her and put his hand on her stomach. The tension slipped out of the room like an unwanted stranger. It was dark
except for the light from the corridor.
“Can I play you a Kashmiri song?”
“No, thanks, man. I’m not a Kashmiri Nationalist.”
“You soon will be. In three or maybe four days’ time.”
“Why’s that?”
“You will be, because I know you. When you see what you see and hear what you hear, you won’t have a choice. Because you are you.”
“Is there going to be a convocation? I’ll get a degree?”
“Yes. And you’ll pass with flying colors. I know you.”
“You don’t really know me. I’m a patriot. I get goosebumps when I see the national flag. I get so emotional I can’t think straight. I love flags and soldiers and all that marching around stuff. What’s the song?”
“You’ll like it. I carried it through the curfew for you. It was written for us, for you and me. By a fellow called Las Kone, from my village. You’ll love it.”
“I’m pretty sure I won’t.”
“Come on. Give me a chance.”
Musa took out a CD from the pocket of his pheran and put it into the player. Within seconds of the opening chords of the guitar, Tilo’s eyes snapped open.
Trav’ling lady, stay awhile
until the night is over.
I’m just a station on your way,
I know I’m not your lover.
“Leonard Cohen.”
“Yes. Even he doesn’t know that he’s really a Kashmiri. Or that his real name is Las Kone…”
Well I lived with a child of snow
when I was a soldier,
and I fought every man for her
until the nights grew colder.
She used to wear her hair like you
except when she was sleeping,
and then she’d weave it on a loom
of smoke and gold and breathing.
And why are you so quiet now
standing there in the doorway?
You chose your journey long before